Perl 6 Fundamentals

Gain the skills to begin developing Perl 6 applications from the ground up in this hands-on compact book, which includes a foreword from Larry Wall, creator of Perl. You’ll learn enough to get started building with Perl 6, using Perl 6’s gradual typing, handy object orientation features, powerful parsing capabilities, and human-usable concurrency. After a short introduction, each chapter develops a small example project, explaining the Perl 6 features used. When the example is done, you’ll explore another aspect, such as optimizing further for readability or testing the code.

Along the way you’ll see Perl 6 basics, such as variables and scoping; subroutines; classes and objects; regexes; and code testing. When you’ve mastered the basics, Perl 6 Fundamentals moves onto more advanced topics to give you a deeper understanding of the language. You’ll learn, amongst other things, how to work with persistent storage, how to generate good error messages, and how to write tricky applications such as a file and directory usage graph and a Unicode search tool.

What You’ll Learn

• Get coding with Perl 6
• Work on several hands-on examples and projects
• Integrate Python libraries into your Perl 6 programs
• Parse INI files using regexes and grammars
• Build a date time converter
• Carry out refactoring and other automated tests

Who This Book Is For

If you already know one or more programming languages, and want to learn about Perl 6, this book is for you.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What Is Perl 6?

Chapter 2: Running Rakudo Perl 6

Chapter 3: Formatting a Sudoku Puzzle

Chapter 4: Datetime Conversion for the Command Line

Chapter 5: Testing say()

Chapter 6: Silent-Cron, a Cron Wrapper

Chapter 7: Stateful Silent-Cron

Chapter 8: Review of the Perl 6 Basics

Chapter 9: Parsing INI Files Using Regexes and Grammars

Chapter 10: A File and Directory Usage Graph

Chapter 11: A Unicode Search Tool

Chapter 12: Plotting Using Inline::Python and Matplotlib

Chapter 13: What’s Next?

About the Author

Moritz Lenz is a Perl 6 core developer. He has contributed significantly to the official test suite, the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, and is the initiator of the official Perl 6 documentation project. He has also authored several modules, and runs infrastructure for the Perl 6 community. In his day job, he develops Perl 5 and Python code, and maintains a Continuous Delivery system for his employer.